Human waste camps
A dark, repressive trend in the business field known as "corrections" is sweeping the United States, and it bodes ill both for the captives and for the communities from which they were captured.
America is revealing a visage stark with harshness. Nowhere is that face more contorted than in the dark netherworld of prison, where humans are transformed into nonpersons, numbered beings cribbed into boxes of unlife, where the very soul is under destructive onslaught.
We are in the midst of the Marionization [1] of U.S. prisons, where the barest illusion of human rehabilitation is stripped from the mission, to be replaced by dehumanization by design. As prison populations swell to bursting, states scramble for funds to construct new control units, known by a variety of names: RHU, SMU, SHU, Supermax. Their public relations spokesmen defend such units as rural, isolated reserves for the "worst of the worst."
That justification was the basis for the infamous lockdown of the Marion federal penitentiary, where the government promptly dumped a number of political prisoners, including, for a time at least, former Black Panther Sundiata Acoli, former American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier, former resistance conspiracy defendant Dr. Alan Berkman, and North American anti-imperialist Tim Blunk, among others. In 1987, Amnesty International reported that Marion violates almost every one of the United Nations' Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners. Several TV networks recently reported on the Pelican Bay, California, Supermax, a state torture chamber called Skeleton Bay by prisoners. In Pennsylvania, a so-called special management unit (SMU) was built in a rural, financially strapped area, where the state specializes in shriveling the soul. It seems to specialize also in punishing jailhouse lawyers, and serves as punishment for those who had the nerve to win civil and criminal suits. Consider one case: Dennis "Solo" McKeithan explains his history before being sent to the SMU. "From June 1985 to November 1, 1989, I never went to the hole while in prison and never had a misconduct more serious than two sticks of reefer. I went three years without any kind of misconduct while engaging in studies, [being] a literacy tutor and all." In March 1992, all that changed after Solo was charged with hitting a nurse at Huntingdon prison. Shortly thereafter, the writer saw him locked in a cage on B block, his left eye swollen to the size of a golf ball.
In an astonishing, unexpected event, Solo was tried and acquitted (Yes!) on November 13, 1992, by an all-white, rural Huntingdon County jury, who disbelieved the (white) nurse's tale.
On November 17, 1992, despite the acquittal, Solo was shipped to the SMU and locked down.
Now having lost eighteen pounds since his arrival, he battles for his freedom, and dignity, against a system designed to deny both.
September 1993
***
Black march to death
Every day in America the trek continues, a black march to death row.
In Pennsylvania, where African-Americans constitute 9 percent of the population, over 60 percent of its death row inhabitants are black. Across the nation, although the numbers are less stark, the trend is unmistakable. In October 1991 the Bureau of Justice Statistics released its national update, which revealed that 40 percent of America's death row population is black. This, out of a population that is a mere 11 percent of the national populace. The five states with the largest death rows have larger percentages on death row than in their statewide black populations.
Statistics are often flexible in interpretation and, like scripture, can be cited for any purpose. Does this mean that African-Americans are somehow innocents, subjected to a setup by state officials? Not especially. What it does suggest is that state actors, at all stages of the criminal justice system, including slating at the police station, arraignment at the judicial office, pretrial, trial, and sentencing stage before a court, treat African-American defendants with a special vengeance not experienced by white defendants.
This is the dictionary definition of "discrimination."
In the 1987 case McCleskey v. Kemp, the famed Baldus study revealed facts that unequivocally proved the following [2]: (1) defendants charged with killing white victims in Georgia are 4.3 times as likely to be sentenced to death as defendants charged with killing blacks; (2) six of every eleven defendants convicted of killing a white person would not have received the death sentence if their victim had been black; and (3) cases involving black defendants and white victims are more likely to result in a death sentence than cases featuring any other racial combination of defendant and victim.
Although the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5 to 4 vote, rejected McCleskey's claims, it could hardly reject the facts underlying them.
Retired Justice Powell said in essence that "differences don't amount to discrimination."
The bedrock reason that McCleskey was denied relief was the fear, again expressed by Powell, that "McCleskey's claim, taken to its logical conclusion, throws into serious question the principles that underlie our entire criminal justice system." How true. McCleskey can't be correct, or else the whole system is incorrect.
Now that couldn't be the case, could it?
December 1991
***
Slavery daze II
A specter haunts America's black communities. Vampirish, it sucks the souls out of black lives, leaving skeletal husks behind, mobile, animated, but emotionally and spiritually dead. This is not the result of a dark Count Drac attack, nor a spell woven by a sinister shaman; it is the direct result of global greed, governmental deception, and the eternal longing of the poor to escape, however briefly, from the crippling shackles of utter poverty.
Their quest for relief is spelled C-R-A-C-K. Crack. Rock. Call it what you will, it is, in truth, another word for "death" in African-American communities.
Harvested in Latin America's Peruvian highlands, treated in jungle labs, "cured" in a chemical bath of ether and kerosene, carried into the U.S.A. by government-hired pilots as a way to pay the fledgling contras' bills, cocaine comes to Chocolate City, U.S.A., and, transformed into crystalline crack, wreaks havoc on poor black life. Forgotten by the federal government, stigmatized by the state government, shunted aside, ignored, or exploited by city governments, the poor are perceived as problems, or ostracized as alien others, beyond the social pale, anything but people who are not provided the basic tools of survival. It is these poor folks, locked in American Bantustans, who have fallen the hardest for crack.
Just as the "Just Say No" generation got down from the political stage, tons of a new potent poison were being peddled in poor sections of town, brought to these shores courtesy of the Iran-contra funds diversion scheme, as masterminded by that great American hero Honest Ollie North (known as Operation Black Eagle -- CIA). Why would the government (the same government that says "Just Say No") dare bring cocaine into the States, if not to sell it, to turn it into lucre, into cold cash? If their intent was to destroy it, this could have easily been done outside the U.S.A. It was not destroyed. I suspect an ulterior motive.
Recent history, back in the radical 1960s, saw a flood of pills, pot, and high-grade heroin into black neighborhoods. Radicals suspected then that the malevolent hand of Big Brother opened the floodgates of drugs to drown out the black revolutionary fires of urban resistance.
With a hostile U.S. Supreme Court, growing unemployment, a federal government that "kindly" and "gently" turned its back on the homeless, police forces marauding like Green Berets over inner cities, African-American resistance seems a likely response.
Open the floodgates, again -- this time with a potent, mind-sucking, soul-ripping poison that takes utter priority over all else. The natural instinct of motherhood melts into mud next to the pangs of the crack attack.
Babies are being sold, and mothers sell themselves, in homage to the plastic vial.
Homes disintegrate into New Age caves under the spell of the 'caine. Families fall apart, as fathers are herded into newly built prisons and mothers haunt ho-strolls, all in an infernal lust for that sweet, deadly poison.
There is a precedent for such a diabolical scheme in U.S. history. How many Native "American" communities and tribes were devastated by the European introduction of "fire water" (alcohol, rum, etc.) into the tribal diet, and indeed wiped out?
This is a dire hour for Africans in the United States.
Will we survive this plague?
July 1989
***
Skeleton bay
Distrust anyone in whom the desire to punish is powerful.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche
[F]or what purpose did Nature give me my foot? — To kick, by St. Anacreon, and not merely to run away! To trample on all the worm-eaten "chairs," the cowardly contemplators, the lascivious eunuchs of history, the flirters with ascetic ideals, the righteous hypocrites of impotence! All reverence on my part to the ascetic ideal, in so far as it is honourable! So long as it believes in itself and plays no pranks on us! But I like not all these coquettish bugs who have an insatiate ambition to smell of the infinite, until eventually the infinite smells of bugs; I like not the whited sepulchres with their stagey reproduction of life; I like not the tired and the used up who wrap themselves in wisdom and look "objective"; I like not the agitators dressed up as heroes, who hide their dummy-heads behind the stalking-horse of an ideal; I like not the ambitious artists who would fain play the ascetic and the priest, and are at bottom nothing but tragic clowns; I like not, again, these newest speculators in idealism, the Anti-Semites, who nowadays roll their eyes in the patent Christian-Aryan-man-of-honour fashion, and by an abuse of moralist attitudes and agitation dodges, so cheap as to exhaust any patience, strive to excite all the blockhead elements in the populace (the invariable success of every kind of intellectual charlatanism in present-day Germany hangs together with the almost indisputable and already quite palpable desolation of the German mind, whose cause I look for in a too exclusive diet, of papers, politics, beer, and Wagnerian music, not forgetting the condition precedent of this diet, the national exclusiveness and vanity, the strong but narrow principle, "Germany, Germany above everything," and finally the paralysis agitans of "modern ideas").
-- The Genealogy of Morals, by Friedrich Nietzsche
As of 1993, according to U.S. Bureau of Justice statistics, there were 119,951 people including parolees imprisoned in California. [3] At last count, California had over twenty-eight prisons and spends over $1 billion annually ($1,000,000,000!) on prisons. One billion! And then there's Pelican Bay prison, a hellish home for thirty-seven hundred prisoners, located in an isolated rural area called Crescent City, California. If Pelican Bay prison is a hell, [4] then its special housing unit (SHU), commonly called SHOE, is the lower depths, where nearly thirteen hundred men are consigned to a state program of torture and governmental terrorism, so much so that major news agencies, such as CBS's 60 Minutes, have reported on the unit.
Prisoners there haven't taken the abusive treatment lying down, as evidenced by a civil suit filed in federal court, charging the state with "lawless" activity. "The law stops at the gates of Pelican Bay," attorney Susan Creighton told the court in her opening argument late September in San Francisco. At the SHU, men are beaten, burned, and isolated by state officers. Prisoners spend twenty-two and a half hours a day in windowless eight-by-ten cells, with no human contact or educational opportunities.
One defense psychologist, Dr. Craig Haney, found "chronic depression, hallucinations and thought disorders" at levels existing at no other prison in the United States. The symptoms were comparable only to findings from a psychiatric prison in the former East Germany, known for torture and solitary confinement, Haney testified. Indeed, the conditions are so horrendous that a former warden of the infamous hellhole Marion, Illinois, openly criticized Pelican, tracing a record of numerous injuries and deaths to guards' routine use of excessive force.
Charles E. Fenton, ex-warden of Marion Federal Penitentiary testified in the suit, "There seems to be an attitude ... that it's proper for staff to shoot at inmates" (San Francisco Chronicle, September 29, 1993).
"They either absolutely don't know what they're doing or they're deliberately inflicting pain," said Fenton.
Marion Federal Penitentiary, known as Son of Alcatraz, was itself condemned as violative of fundamental human rights by Amnesty International. Pelican Bay (called Skeleton Bay by prisoners) is Son of Marion, taken to such an inhumane degree that even Marion's old warden gasps in shock at the ugliness that is his spawn. Five years from now, will we be moaning about the Son of Pelican?
If we don't rumble now, against all fascistic control units, such as Pelican, Pennsylvania's SMU, Shawnee Unit at Marianna, Florida, and Colorado State Penitentiary, you may not be able to rumble later.
The solution is not in the courts but in an awake, aware people.
October 1993
***
No law, no rights
A federal civil rights trial in Philadelphia charging seven former Graterford prison guards with violating the civil rights of a number of prisoners by severely beating them, while they were shackled and cuffed hand and foot, in November 1989, revealed in glaring fashion how, in prisons, there is no law -- there are no rights.
Despite the guilty pleas and damning testimony of five ex-guards, that they and their colleagues maliciously beat, kicked, stomped, blackjacked, and tasered (that is, used a handheld electric shocking device) prisoners who committed no institutional offenses, a civil jury acquitted the seven of virtually all charges in February 1993.
One juror was quoted as saying that although it was proven that prisoners were badly beaten, no conspiracy was proven by U.S. prosecutors. One prisoner who suffered from AIDS, and thus had fewer internal resources with which to rebound from the horrific physical and psychological trauma he suffered in the beating, has since died.
The monthlong trial revealed that guards thought nineteen prisoners who were transferred from Camp Hill prison shortly after rioters and rebels nearly leveled the central Pennsylvania facility to a pile of smouldering ashes were part of the rioting crews that ripped it apart. In fact, the nineteen were nonrioters, who were only too glad to be leaving what came to be called Camp Hell, and to be coming to the state's largest, and blackest, prison: Graterford.
Instead, they were leaving the fire only to get simmered in the frying pan, so to speak.
At Graterford, whose massive haunting walls seemed to offer some relief from the raging literal and psychic infernos of Camp Hill, the nineteen men met uniformed hatred and naked brutality, as they were beaten, kicked, and terrorized by government officials sworn to protect the illusive "peace" in prisons -- guards who, acting on nothing but assumptions, assaulted over a dozen men on the notion that they were troublemakers. Some, those few who could navigate the treacherous straits and shoals of civil litigation, sued state officials for damages. Others bound up their wounds and blended into the wall while waiting for terms to expire, so they could be "free" again. Several testified in the federal prosecution.
One died.
But all found out how fragile the very system that stole their very freedom was when the state committed crimes against them. All found out that words like "justice," "law," "civil rights," and, yes, "crime" have different and elastic meanings depending on whose rights were violated, who committed what crimes against whom, and whether one works for the system or against it.
For those people, almost a million at last count, who wear the label "prisoner" around their necks, there is no law, there is no justice, there are no rights.
February 1993
***
Two bites of the apple in Dixie
Last term, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a full, foul package of repressive rulings, but perhaps none was more obscene than Penry v. Lynaugh, where the Court stamped its seal of approval on the execution of the mentally retarded. In Penry, the Rehnquist right wing, represented by Justice O'Connor, justified its decision by proclaiming that "no national consensus exists" opposing capital punishment for the retarded. Penry represents the clearest instance of "justice" by "public opinion poll," also known as "national consensus," now holding sway in America's court of last resort. [5] As it happened, however, the Court's majority was dead wrong.
In a recently published National Law Journal/ LEXIS crime poll, conducted by Penn and Schoen Associates of New York, the figures reveal an overwhelming majority of Americans, 69 percent, oppose the death penalty for retarded persons (NLJ, August 7, 1989). The poll suggests, on this issue at least, that the Court's rightist majority is simply out of step with America's majority. Such statistics, however, are hollow where life and death are concerned.
For Horace Dunkins, Jr., who was strapped into Alabama's electric chair on July 14, 1989, shortly past midnight, it had no meaning at all. Horace Dunkins was retarded. His meager IQ matched the percentage of Americans who opposed his legalized murder -- 69. But if the dictionary definition of "retarded" (slow or limited intellect) has any relevance here, surely the Alabama Department of Corrections should qualify. Dunkins was electrocuted -- twice. At 12:08 A.M., the executioner flipped the switch, sending manmade lightning surging through Dunkins. The doctors found the man alive, unconscious. Perhaps it is fitting that Alabama's "Corrections" Department could not correctly execute an execution, without torturing its charge. Alabama legally killed Dunkins [6] with the blessing of the U.S. Supreme Court's 5 to 4 majority.
In a series of articles written by Dunkins's lawyer, Stephen D. Ellis, in Philadelphia's Legal Intelligencer, [7] the fundamental unfairness of Dunkins's fate, and the nightmarish details of his double electrocution, are recounted, in a case Ellis called a "miscarriage of justice." For most Americans, one electrocution is the stuff of mystery, as most have never witnessed it. For most it is a forbidden zone, an act committed in the dark far from the madding crowd, an act accomplished in a state of stealth.
Several decades ago, a celebrated justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court did witness an execution by electrocution, and wrote:
He started, painfully and uncertainly, to lower himself into the chair, but now the guards were swift. They lifted him deep into the seat and adjusted the electrodes at calves and wrists. Then they fastened a thick belt across his chest and lowered over his head the heavy wired leather mask. It hid all but the tip of his nose and his lips. He was making efforts to quiet them by biting his tongue, the best that he could do, against his racing mind and heart, to keep control and to sit erect .... [8]
Then Justice Bok goes to the meat of his blow-by-blow recap:
The guards stepped back. The Warden, who had stood by with arms raised, lowered his hand. It had taken a minute and thirty-seven seconds.
There was a low whine and a short loud snap, as of huge teeth closing. Roger's head flew back and his body leaped forward against the confining straps. Almost at once smoke arose from his head and left wrist and was sucked up into the ventilator overhead. The body churned against the bonds, and the lips ceased trembling and turned red, then slowly changed to blue. Moisture appeared on the skin and a sizzling noise was audible. The smell of burning flesh grew heavy in the air.
Roger was being broiled.
The current went off with a distinct clap after about two minutes and Roger slumped back into his seat, his head hanging. No one moved. Then came the second jolt and again the body surged against the restraining straps and smoke rose from it. The visible flesh was turkey red.
Again the current slammed off and this time the doctor stepped forward to listen, but he moved back again and shook his head. Apparently Roger still clung faintly to life.
The third charge struck him, and again the smoking and sizzling and broiling. His flesh was swelling around the straps. The doctor listened carefully and raised his head. "I pronounce this man dead," he said, folding up his stethoscope. It was seven minutes after Roger had been seated in the chair.
-- Star Wormwood, 114-115
Thirty years after Justice Bok's eerie description of the Keystone State's triple electrocution, America makes "progress," at a snail's pace, with the torturous double electrocution of Horace Dunkins, a retarded black man in Alabama. While the state of Georgia barred the execution of mentally retarded folks, its sister state, "the heart of Dixie," did not have such a law, and in its fourth execution since reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976, it has presented a spectacle of heartlessness and utter incompetence. Even supporters of capital punishment, faced with the torturous double frying of Horace Dunkins, must mutter to themselves, "Do it right, dammit -- or don't do it at all!"
August 1989
***
Blackmun bows out of the death game
Harry A. Blackmun, the U.S. Supreme Court's senior justice, has finally held, as a matter of constitutional law, that the death penalty, as currently administered, is unconstitutional.
Blackmun, in a dissenting opinion in the case Callins v. Collins [9] announced his position in a lengthy dissent that was severely critical of the majority of the Court for "having virtually conceded that both fairness and rationality cannot be achieved" in their death penalty cases, adding, "The Court has chosen to deregulate the entire enterprise, replacing, it would seem, substantive constitutional requirements with mere aesthetics .... "
In what appeared to be judicial bitterness, Blackmun further announced, "From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death."
The Blackmun dissent, which recounts Supreme Court precedent from its death docket, is a grim telling of judicial restrictions; cases stemming from the 1976 case Gregg v. Georgia, [10] which reinstated the death penalty, to more recent ones, such as Herrera v. Collins, [11] where the Court denied a hearing to a man trying to prove innocence.
But if Blackmun's denunciation of his benchmates seemed bitter, the response of some on death row seemed equally acerbic.
"Why now?" asked one.
"What's it mean?" asked another.
Blackmun's trek, from Gregg v. Georgia, where the death penalty was reinstated, to Callins v. Collins, where he condemned capital punishment to unconstitutionality, in a singular dissent, comes almost a quarter century too late for many in the shadow of the death house. His principled refusal to further "tinker with the machinery of death" comes after the machine has been fine-tuned and stripped to its malevolent best, after all of its bugs have been purged and a pit crew installed to keep it running well into the next century.
Blackmun's critical fifth vote in the Gregg case made the death penalty possible and formed the foundation for the plethora of cases now condemned in Callins, like McCleskey, Herrera, Sawyer, [12] and others, for without Gregg, the others would not be. Further, his dissent, although remarkable in its passioned discourse, is of negligible legal force and will save not one life, not even defendant Callins. Blackmun, in his death penalty jurisprudence at least, assumes the late Justice Marshall's mantle of the lone dissenter, a Jeremiah preaching in a dry, searing judicial wilderness, where few will hear and none will follow.
Had he joined Marshall while he lived, and Brennan while he adjudicated, a life bloc might have emerged, with enough light and enough strength to fashion a majority by attracting two stragglers, but this never occurred and, he suggests in his dissent in Callins, may never occur.
He wrote:
Perhaps one day this Court will develop procedural rules or verbal formulas that actually will provide consistency, fairness, and reliability in a capital-sentencing scheme. I am not optimistic that such a day will come. I am more optimistic though, that this Court eventually will conclude that the effort to eliminate arbitrariness while preserving fairness in the infliction of [death] is so plainly doomed to failure that it -- and the death penalty -- must be abandoned altogether. I may not live to see that day, but I have faith that eventually it will arrive.
To which some on death row respond, "No time soon."
March 1994
***
Jury of peers?
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed ....
-- Sixth Amendment, U.S. Constitution
Much of the propaganda beamed around the world proclaims the glories of U.S. democracy, such as "free" elections, representative government, and trial by jury. The following is assuredly not broadcast.
William Henry Hance [13] was convicted of killing a Georgia prostitute back in 1978 and sentenced to death. His trial, and even his subsequent retrial, took place before predominantly white juries. One of those jurors, the only black juror, filed a sworn affidavit that she never agreed to the death sentence, a claim seconded by another, white juror. The second juror paints a picture of a trial that was more a lynching than a legal proceeding.
This juror, Pamela Lemay, swore in a notarized affidavit that she heard another white juror, a woman, state, "The nigger admitted he did it, he should fry." At several instances, at the hotel, and during deliberations out of the black juror's presence, Ms. Lemay swore she heard other white jurors refer to Hance as "a typical nigger" and "just one more sorry nigger that no one would miss." During deliberations as to whether Hance should be executed or sentenced to life, a juror remarked that execution would be best because that way, "there'd be one less nigger to breed."
This, in America, is the true meaning of a "jury of peers."
Did any of this bother either the Georgia superior court, the Georgia Supreme Court, the U.S. Supreme Court, or the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles?
Absolutely not.
On April 31, 1994, at 10 P.M., William Henry Hance, a man both retarded and mentally ill, was executed, that is, "legally lynched," by the government of Georgia -- by electrocution.
Georgia's state motto is ""Wisdom, Justice, and Moderation." In the case of William Henry Hance, these three elements seemed sorely lacking.
In an emergency appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court hours before Hance's electrocution, Justice Blackmun, in a dissenting opinion in Hance's case, wrote that even if he hadn't "reached the conclusion that the death penalty cannot be imposed fairly within the constraints of our constitution ... I could not support its imposition in this case." Quoth Blackmun: "There is substantial evidence that William Henry Hance is mentally retarded as well as mentally ill. There is reason to believe that his trial and sentencing proceedings were infected with racial prejudice. One of his sentencers has come forward to say that she did not vote for the death penalty because of his mental impairments."
A majority of the Supreme Court rejected this reasoning. And in the last analysis, the courts and agencies of both Georgia and the United States agreed with the anonymous juror at his trial who believed that Hance would be better off dead, that his death would mean "one less nigger to breed."
April 1994
***
Expert witness from hell
In 1987, a twenty-eight-year-old West Virginia cemetery worker, Glen Dale Woodall, was convicted of the vicious, brutal kidnapping and rape of two women. His life almost ended when a judge sentenced him to two life terms, with an additional 325-year sentence for the crimes.
The evidence was convincing: the state's medical examiner testified that Woodall's semen was found in both victims. Medical examiners, like all expert witnesses, are accorded high respect in American courts, for they are thought to be totally impartial, and only an ally of science. In Woodall's case, the testimony of medical examiner Fred Zain was the key that locked him away in a dim prison cell for the rest of his natural life. There was only one problem: Zain, forensic expert for the West Virginia State Police for over a decade, was wrong.
After Woodall spent almost five years in prison, his lawyer, Lonnie Simmons, took a long shot by having remnants of the semen found in the victims tested by the new DNA method. The tests proved conclusively that Woodall's semen did not match the samples. Woodall, sentenced to two life terms, plus 325 years, was innocent.
The West Virginia Supreme Court ordered an examination of the forensic expert's testing in other cases and came up with the startling conclusion that Zain's work was systematically deficient, entering the following ruling: "Any testimony or documentary evidence offered by Zain, at any time, in any criminal prosecution, should be deemed invalid, unreliable and inadmissible."
For thirteen years, Zain testified in hundreds of rape and murder trials in West Virginia, and later performed similarly in San Antonio, Texas, affecting, according to one attorney's estimate, more than forty-five hundred criminal cases in two states.
In 1990, a handyman, Jack Davis, was sentenced to life in prison for the 1989 murder and mutilation of a central Texas woman. Zain testified at Davis's trial that blood found under the victim's body placed the defendant at the scene. Davis's lawyer, Stanley Schneider, proved that, in fact, no test was done. Zain, according to forensic specialists in both states, wrote reports on tests that were never done, reported positive matches where negatives would have cleared suspects, and listed as "conclusive" test results that were inconclusive. His efforts to please cops and prosecutors sent possibly thousands of innocent men to serve centuries in prisons across two states, some on death row.
As of this writing, the ex-medical examiner hasn't been charged with a single offense in either state. His lawyer, Larry Souza, laments that Zain's life has been "ruined. He can't find a job in his profession. He's been reduced to working as a common laborer. He has nowhere to go."
I'm sure several thousand prisoners in West Virginia and Texas have some ideas about where to send him.
May 1994
***
The demand for death
Death row prisoner Michael Alan Durocher of Florida sent a letter to the governor, literally begging to be executed. When Governor Lawton Chiles signed his death warrant, Durocher sent him a thank-you note. On August 25, 1993, at 7:15 A.M., Durocher, thirty-three, got his wish.
California's death row convict David Mason fired his appellate lawyers, stating his willingness to die in the gas chamber. Mason, thirty-six, was angrily critical of what he called the "industry" of lawyers capitalizing off of capital appeals. Despite his eleventh-hour conversion from his previous determination to die, the Mason case came to symbolize the apparently growing occurrence of death row prisoners who demand death. The case also demonstrates the difference between popular perception and reality.
Of the approximately twenty-seven hundred men and women on U.S. death rows, only twenty-six people, less than 1 percent, have volunteered to be executed. The Washington, D.C.-based National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty has assembled data detailing the racial breakdown of those opting for execution, and found the following:
Race of Prisoners
White
Black
Latino
Not available
Number
21
2
2
1
Percentage
80.8
7.7
7.7
3.8
Whites constitute less than 51 percent of all death row prisoners in the United States but make up over 80 percent of all volunteers for execution. Why?
Nationally, African-Americans mark roughly 40 percent of the U.S. death row population and 46 percent of state prisoners.
Increasingly, since the rebellious 1960s, prison populations have become blacker and blacker, a reality that can be perceived only as threatening and fearful to the average white prisoner. For far too many blacks, prisons have become a warped rite of passage, a malevolent mark of manhood, and a dark expectation.
For whites, however, even working-class whites, prison is a mark of social expulsion in extremis, and an affirmation of one's outcast status. Blacks have a longer history of rejection from this society than the relatively recent era of grudging acceptance. Many have been socialized into oppression, with prison just one more grim experience, in a bitter existence.
What all share equally, however, is the relentless regime of lockdown, loneliness, isolation, and hopelessness while one awaits death, exacting a terrible psychic, spiritual, psychological, and familial toll. A flight to death, then, is often a flight from the soul-killing conditions of death row.
September 1993
***
Already out of the game
The newest political fever sweeping the nation, the "three strikes, you're out" rage, will, barring any last-minute changes, become law in the United States, thereby opening the door to a state-by-state march to an unprecedented prison building boom. What most politicians know, however, is what most people do not -- that "three strikes, you're out" will do next to nothing to eradicate crime, and will not create the illusive dream of public safety.
They also know that it will be years before the bills come due, but when they do, they'll be real doozies; by then, they reason, they'll be out of office, and it'll be another politician's problem. That's because the actual impact of "three strikes" will not be felt for at least ten to twenty years from now, simply because that's the range someone arrested today would face already (under the current laws), and the additional time, not to mention additional costs, will kick in then.
It seems a tad superfluous to state that already some thirty-four states have habitual offender (so-called career criminal) laws, which call for additional penalties on the second, not the third, felony, in addition to the actual crime. As with every law, taxpayers will have to "pay the cost to be the boss." Pennsylvanians are paying over $600 million this fiscal year for their prisons; Californians, over $2.7 billion this year, with costs for next year expected to top costs for higher education.
As prisons become increasingly geriatric, with populations hitting their fifties and sixties, those already atmospheric costs will balloon exponentially for expected health costs, so that although many Americans, an estimated thirty-seven million, don't have guaranteed health care, prisoners will, although of doubtful quality.
Frankly, it's always amazing to see politicians sell their "We-gotta-get-tough-on-crime" schtick to a country that is already the world's leading incarcerator, and perhaps more amazing to see the country buy it. One state has already trod that tough ground, back in the 1970s; California "led" the nation in 1977 with their tough "determinate sentencing" law, and their prison population exploded over 500 percent, from 22,486 in 1973 to 119,000 in 1993, now boasting the largest prison system in the Western world -- 50 percent larger than the entire federal prison system. Do Californians -- rushing to pass the "three strikes, you're out" ballot initiative -- feel safer?
A more cynical soul, viewing this prison-boom bill through the lens of economic interest, might suppose that elements of the correctional industry, builders, guards' unions, and the like are fueling the boom, at least in part.
Another element is the economy itself, where America enters the postindustrial age, when Japan produces the world's computer chips; Germany produces high performance autos; and America produces ... prisons. Prisons are where America's jobs programs, housing programs, and social control programs merge into a dark whole; and where those already outside of the game can be exploited and utilized to keep the game going.
March 1994
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A bill that is a crime
The so-called crime bill, that profane political expletive, is now the law. Packing some sixty-odd death penalties, a "three strikes, you're out" provision, and billions of bucks for cops and prisons, the crime bill, as proposed by President Clinton, was an act so Draconian that neither presidents Bush nor Reagan could have successfully passed such a measure. The bill is, in essence, a $30+ billion public employment program for predominantly white workers, a social program if ever there was one that reflects the changing face of America's sociopolitical and economic reality.
So nakedly political was the fight for the bill's passage, that it boiled down to a misleading equation of "pork" vs. "toughness." Republicans attacked the bill as "pork"; Democrats touted it as "tough on crime"; while both sides were merely seeking partisan advantage for the fall campaigns.
It is the purest pork to call for building prisons in a nation that leads the entire world in imprisonment of its citizens. The outbreaks of criminal cops uncovered by the New York Mollen Commission reveals that the equation "more cops = less crime" is both simplistic and erroneous. This is porkchopish in the extreme.
For prisoners, the crime bill outlaws knowledge, because it prohibits government funds for college courses, as the following provision notes;
Sec. 20411. Awards of Pell Grants to Prisoners Prohibited.
"(a) In General. -- Section 401(b)(8) of the Higher Education Act of 1965 (20 U.S.C. 1070.a.(b)(8)) is amended to read as follows:
"(8) No basic grant shall be awarded under the subpart to any individual who is incarcerated in any federal or state penal institution.
How any member of Congress can, in good faith, reason that human ignorance fights crime or protects society is beyond comprehension. Indeed, it can be said that ignorance is the mother of all crime.
But the ideologically driven drivel that is the crime bill, this dark political ticket for reelection, will bite the asses of Americans for generations to come. It will drive public bankruptcy; it will fuel greater violence; it will create prisoners who are dumber, more alienated, but more desperate in life's scuffle for survival.
Consider this: The drugged-out zombie about to rob you calculates the worth of stealing your property versus four to eight years in prison, if caught. Factor in your property versus life without parole, and your life, not your property, is devalued.
That swift and fatal calculation is being tallied hourly in cities from coast to coast, and the so-called crime bill just made it more costly -- for you.
September 1994
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Notes:
1. "Marionization" coined in Human Rights Watch Report. Prison conditions in the U.S. 1991. In 1983 Marion Federal Penitentiary became a permanent lockdown control unit. The forebear and model of Super Max prisons in thirty-eight states. Three of the newest control unit prisons are in Pelican Bay, California; Florence, Colorado; and Greene County, Pennsylvania.
2. McCleskey v. Kemp 481 U.S. 279 (1987); quoted verbatim.
3. A recent New York Times poll shows that more than one million people are now in U.S. state and federal prisons.
4. In January 1995 the U.S. District Court held the state could continue operating Pelican Bay, and while the U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson was critical of the unit, he declined to declare it unconstitutional, despite evidence that guards inflicted unjustified beatings upon and hog-tying of prisoners.
5. Penry v. Lynaugh, 492 U.S. S.Ct., 302 106 L.Ed.2d 256 (1989).
6. Peter Applebome, Two Electric Jolts in Alabama Execution, New York Times, July 15, 1989, p. 6. Philadelphia's Legal Intelligencer, Stephen D. Ellis articles about executions of mentally ill and his client Horace Dunkins, Jr., executed by the state of Alabama, July 14, 1989.
7. S. D. Ellis, The Execution of Horace Dunkins Jr. (parts 1 and 2); The Legal Intelligencer; (8/23/89-8/24/89), p. 9.
8. Though taken from Bok's Star Wormwood, text was found by the author at Op. AG. No. 1 (1971), Opinions of the Attorney General; Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, p. 5 citing opinion of former Attorney General Fred Speaker; the Attorney General in 1971 was J. Shane Creamer.
9. Callins v. Collins 114 5.Ct. 1127 (1994); quotes verbatim.
10. Gregg v. Georgia 96 S.Ct. 128 U.S. 153,49 L.Ed.2d 859 (1976).
11. Herrera v. Collins, 113 S.Ct. 853 (1993).
12. Sawyer v. Whitley 112 S.Ct. 2514 (1994).
13. Hance v. Zant 114 S.Ct. 1392 (1994).